As a result of economic globalization, many enterprises operate a main corporate office along with many remote office sites, called branch offices. In order to provide network connectivity between all of the offices of an enterprise, a wide area network (“WAN”) is typically utilized. A WAN is a computer network that covers a wide geographic area and that may include many computers operating in different geographic locations. For instance, a company based in the Western hemisphere may utilize a WAN to provide connectivity to branch offices located in the Eastern hemisphere.
A large portion of the information technology (“IT”) budgets of corporations around the world is expended on establishing and maintaining the technology in and network connectivity of branch offices. In particular, a large portion of these budgets is expended on the purchase and maintenance of WAN links to branch offices. The trend toward globally disbursed offices is expected to increase the use of WANs along with the associated costs to enterprise. As a result, it is generally desirable to improve WAN utilization in order to reduce WAN maintenance costs.
Various technologies are currently utilized to maximize WAN utilization and thereby reduce the associated WAN link costs. For instance, technologies like data compression, quality of service (“QoS”), traffic shaping, transmission control protocol (“TCP”) optimization, wide area file services (“WAFS”), caching, and others may be utilized to maximize WAN utilization. In many cases, these technologies are aggregated into a network appliance that resides at each branch office. Unfortunately, these devices are often expensive and also require administrative supervision that may not be available at a branch office. More troubling, however, is the fact that these current solutions do not operate well in environments where end-to-end security is necessary.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that aspects of a method, system, apparatus, and computer-readable medium for secure peer-to-peer (“P2P”) cache sharing are described herein.